Snorting with disbelief at my own stubbornness, I silence the dutiful alarm and sit up. My bedroom is vast and without ceiling. It is a home to some, but not to me. The wind that has blasted out of the north for many thousands of years has completed its nightly ritual of weakening to a stiff breeze. I had foregone a tent as the dust and sand have a way of getting in. With no tent it piles up beside me and then simply blows past.

I scrape a triangle of processed cheese over a dry, stiff chunk of bread and force it down my throat with frugal sips of water. Excepting the eternal shhhhh of the wind, it is quiet now and I allow myself a few minutes of lying back to star gaze. There probably isn't a cloud or an electric light for 100 miles and it would be easy to stay and stare. But I can't. I pack up and march my cumbersome bicycle across the sand to the road. Before mounting I check the time. It's nearly 1am.

The wind feels stronger once I start riding into it. In the daytime it is beyond strong. It is enough to invalidate a weary man's efforts. With the moon over my shirtless shoulder I start to slowly chase my shadow. The pace is frustrating but the solitude is appreciated when my mind is set to it with enough determination. The surrounding landscape is a morass of eerie shapes, all sculpted linearly in a north-south direction by the eons of wind.

* * *

The windy road through Western Sahara

It is 8am now and has been light for a couple of hours. I watched the east lighten with confused relief. Then the rest of the daysky faded slowly into reality. The heat is rising and the wind had reared up. The east is no longer a glorious, shifting transfusion of rich reds and deep oranges. In the place of this dancing lightshow remains the pale, sun-yellowed hue of a bleachy desert horizon.

My legs are complaining but I force them to complete the last of the 60 miles I asked of them when I mounted in the nighttime. For several hours now the regular, whitewashed kilometre stones have glided by, ghostlike and floating in the gloom. Thankfully the dark rendered them unreadable to my straining eyes so they couldn't tease me with their vindictively slow countdown to zero, and to the Mediterranean.

The bicycle computer ticks over the set target so I dismount and wheel gratefully over the stony ground to a large rock. I slump down sheltered from the wind, scrape plastic cheese over stale bread, and eat it. Falling back, I sleep until the afternoon heat wakes me. The wind comes from the north and the sun from the south so I must choose which I prefer to be plagued by. The sun sets, the land cools and I sleep again.

Snorting with disbelief at my own stubbornness, I silence the dutiful alarm and sit up. It is night...

Sunrise over Western Sahara

Riding (the wrong way for photo) along the Atlantic coast

For two weeks I repeated this routine. There were occasional anomalies and distractions but not as many as I wanted at the time. A village or petrol station roughly every 250 miles allowed me to replenish supplies. Now and then I spotted military tents and would ask for water from the soldiers tasked with catching smugglers along the bleak Atlantic coastline that I was loosely tracing.

There are few people in the disputed Western Sahara territory. Larger than the United Kingdom, it is only home to half a million people. Morocco currently administers the phosphate rich region but the indigenous nomadic Saharawis made their claim after Spanish withdrawal in 1975. For the last 40 years the disgruntled, largely-camel herding Saharawis have continued a guerrilla insurgency that has left the area peppered with up to 500,000 land mines. I never slept far from the tested safety of the road.

Sheltering in an abandoned building during the day in Western Sahara

One morning I approached a concrete building with weatherworn walls. Dogs burst aggressively from the gate but a man appeared and waved me over. Ashraf spoke a little French and invited me into the cool building. He told me his job was to drive his digger down a 20 mile stretch of road each day and prevent the sand dunes from encroaching on the tarmac. He was lonely but relatively well paid. I studied his face while he spoke. A nasty knife slash ran from above his right eye to the left corner of his mouth. Deep red scar tissue seemed to seep from it. He looked drawn but happy to be speaking. He set me up on a cheap rug with some cushions and a carton of milk. I slept through the day and the night before breakfasting with him the following morning. He took me into his hermitage near to breaking point and sent me off re-invigorated. I pedalled slowly into the wind throughout that day and didn't mind so much.

Towns gradually became more frequent and the desert less barren. The wind lessened slightly too. I began to stop for a couple of hours each day at small cafes and drink a cheap coffee while reading the news with their wifi. I slowly began to enjoy touring again. To really enjoy it. To enjoy it like I did when I was first hurtling through Europe with bags crammed with new kit and a mind crammed with long held positivity. How had I let myself become so jaded?

Camels line the road through Western Sahara

On a clear, cool morning I left the main road and spent a couple of days winding a route through brown, rocky hills on dirt tracks. Simple villages seemed filled with people watching the world slowly spin around them. Each village shop had fresh plums, olives, tomatoes, limes and peppers. From then on I ate well and relished a inward renaissance of sorts. When opportunity presented I washed in the sea and didn't mind the tide lines of dried brine on my skin. I camped wild and where I pleased. There was never a problem. The balmy autumn weather and the quaint little mosques with scrawny imams always keen to share a cup of mint tea. I felt like I was in a beautifully ramshackle fairytale land; a sun-kissed world of exertion, exhaustion and mental ease.

A homeless man in the midday sun at a petrol station, Western Sahara

Rolling into Agadir was a shock. A huge beach sprawled with a wide concrete boulevard separating it from the city. I wandered along the strip dumbstruck by the alarming acreage of European buttock on display. This beach resort could have been in any of Egypt, Greece, Spain, Cyprus or Turkey. Woman strutted around in clinging bikinis unaware of the covered local women frowning at them. Skinny young Moroccan men with gel-drenched buzz-cuts peacocked back and forth, flirting with overweight pairs of western women at least twenty years older than them. I stayed less than an hour before rejoining the joyous coastal road northward. I slept happily alone on a hill that night and watched the sea mist roll in.

Rugged cliffs on the coast at sunset

Salt production in the Sahara

Dunes in the desert

Abandoned summer shelter of nomadic herders

I started to feel the lure of Europe and made glorious progress. Casablanca kept me only a day to wander her labyrinthine medina and Rabat flashed by with little more than a stroll through a carpet market. Vast and ugly Tarifa loomed on the horizon but I was unstoppable now; excitement rising. I didn't dismount until I reached the ticket office. Ten minutes later I border a ferry and watched Morocco shrink.

Riding down the ramp onto Spanish tarmac was a euphoric moment but, with nobody to share my ebullience, I just smiled uncontrollably. A quick stop in a supermarket preceded a sharp hill climb and my way to a flat ledge on the sea-facing hillside. As I sat in front of my tent eating a chorizo and blue cheese-crammed baguette, I stared across the water at Africa. It was still so close but I'd already left it far behind in my mind. I'd had many hard times over the previous year and a half on that continent but I'd enjoyed much of it too. I raised a bottle of cheap rioja to my lips.

The road into the hills and my 'fairytale valley'

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